Understanding the Billing Process

PeopleSoft Grants integrates with PeopleSoft Contracts, PeopleSoft Project Costing, and PeopleSoft General Ledger to enable bill processing for cash and letter of credit awards. Before you can perform the activities that are associated with award expenditures, you need to set up the billing control tables that are used by the various applications.

PeopleSoft applications rely on tables to store not only business transactions, but also the structure and processing rules that drive the system. Before you can run the processes to generate invoices, you need to establish the structure that tells the system how you want those processes to work.

Before you run the billing processes or manage billing for your awards, you must prepare your PeopleSoft system accordingly.

Make sure that you complete these steps before you initiate the billing processes:

For rate-based billing in PeopleSoft Grants, the Contracts/Billing Interface process (CA_BI_INTFC) selects resource rows from PeopleSoft Project Costing. The system also selects contract lines in PeopleSoft Contracts with Ready bill plans to create bill lines in the billing interface (INTFC_BI and its related tables). When the Contracts/Billing Interface process stages billing data in these tables, the billing interface processes the data to create bills.

The billing interface can create two types of bills:

• Temporary bills

  These bills are routed to the billing worksheet, where the billing administrator can review and, for rate-based bills, amend them as needed before real bills are created. You cannot amend fixed-amount bills in the billing worksheet.

• Real bills

  These bills become invoices that are sent to the customer. You select the option to create temporary or real bills for individual billing plans on the Billing Plan - Billing Plan General page in PeopleSoft Contracts.

You can use the billing worksheet to cancel temporary bills. When you cancel a temporary bill from within the billing worksheet, the system updates PeopleSoft Project Costing and PeopleSoft Contracts accordingly.

After you review a temporary bill on the billing worksheet, you can create a real bill. The system creates a real bill after a user approves it and saves the worksheet. When the bill is finalized, the system updates the Project Resource table (PROJ_RESOURCE) and the Contracts/Billing Interface Xref table (CA_BP_XREF).

This flow chart illustrates the billing process flow for Grants transactions. Billable transactions stored in Contracts and the PROJ_RESOURCE table is selected by the CA_BI_INTFC process and passed to Billing through the Billing Interface process. After the bills are finalized, the Projects/Contracts Interface process updates Contracts and Project Costing with the billed award transaction data:

Updates in PeopleSoft Project Costing and PeopleSoft Contracts are made throughout the billing cycle for rate-based and fixed-fee billing plans.

See Integration Process Flows for PeopleSoft Grants.

Run the Contracts/Billing Interface process in PeopleSoft Contracts to send billing activity in PeopleSoft Project Costing to PeopleSoft Billing. The contracts that you set up control the billing activity that the system selects from PeopleSoft Project Costing.

Instructions on running the Contracts/Billing Interface process appear in the PeopleSoft Contracts documentation.

The Contracts/Billing Interface process populates the Billing Interface table with the billable lines that it finds in the Project Resource table in PeopleSoft Project Costing. The Billing Interface table is a staging table that holds the data until you run the Billing Interface process (BIIF0001) from PeopleSoft Billing.

To verify that the Contracts/Billing interface process imported the billing lines, access the Review Pending Transactions pages in PeopleSoft Billing (select Billing > Interface Transactions > Review Pending Transactions > PS_INTFC_BI).

If you detect a problem with the billing lines, navigate to the Update Pending Transactions pages (select Billing > Interface Transactions > Update Pending Transactions > PS_INTFC_BI) and correct them prior to running the Billing Interface process

Run the Billing Interface process in PeopleSoft Billing to create the temporary bills that you can work on in the billing worksheet. The billing worksheet is a temporary work area in which you can review and adjust billing lines that came through the Billing Interface process before you create actual bills.

After making adjustments, use the Billing Worksheet component to approve or delete temporary bills.

Instructions on running the Billing Interface process appear in the PeopleSoft Billing documentation.

When you accept a bill in the billing worksheet, the system creates a real bill with a real invoice number and updates PeopleSoft Contracts and PeopleSoft Project Costing accordingly.

Instructions on approving billing worksheets appear in the PeopleSoft Billing documentation.

When you delete a billing worksheet, the system:

• Resets the billing distribution status option in PeopleSoft Project Costing for all of the lines that originate in the PeopleSoft Project Costing system with a line type other than UTL, enabling you to send each line to PeopleSoft Billing again at a later time.

• Updates the Contracts Prepaid table for any lines that originate from the PeopleSoft Project Costing system with a line type of UTL.

  The system resets the committed amount on the Contracts Prepaid table to reflect the deleted amount of a utilization bill line and the utilization amount that is available for future billing activities.

• Sets the billing plan event status to Recycled, marks the billing plan line in the Cross-Reference table as Cancelled, and updates the Billing Cross Reference History status to Deleted for all of the cancelled billing plan lines.

  The PeopleSoft Billing bill by functionality enables you to bill two items on separate invoices from the same billing plan—for example, if the items were associated with different projects. Therefore, the system cannot determine whether a cancelled billing worksheet contains all of the bill lines that are associated with a particular event. To help the Contracts Billing Engine process determine which billable items need re-billing when you cancel a worksheet, the system sets the billing plan event status to Recycled and marks the billing plan line in the Cross-Reference table as Cancelled.

  To re-bill lines that are associated with a cancelled billing worksheet, the Contracts Billing Engine process selects all of the recycled events that have a corresponding canceled cross-reference row, and verifies that the canceled cross-reference row is the most recent row that was inserted into the Cross-Reference table for the corresponding bill line and event combination.

Instructions on deleting billing worksheets appear in the PeopleSoft Billing documentation.

After you approve the billing worksheet lines, you can use the Manage Contract/Project Bills link on the Worksheet Search page to review the bills that originated in PeopleSoft Contracts and PeopleSoft Project Costing. You can then use the associated links to generate invoices or continue working with the newly created bill lines.

Run the Finalization process (BIIVC000) on the real bills that you create. This process performs a variety of tasks, including calculating taxes and the due date.

Instructions on running the Finalization process appear in the PeopleSoft Billing documentation.

After you run the Finalization process, run the Billing to Projects/Contracts Interface process (BIPCC000). This process updates PeopleSoft Contracts and PeopleSoft Project Costing with the finalized bill information from PeopleSoft Billing.

Instructions on running the Projects/Contracts Interface process appear in the PeopleSoft Billing documentation.

Rate-based bill rows are inserted into the cross-reference table upon bill finalization. This is because rate-based row amounts are subject to change throughout the billing process.

PeopleSoft Billing provides credit and re-bill functionality when you need to correct invoices containing erroneous grants or projects-related charges. To reflect the original billing activity, as well as the adjustment information, the system enables you to generate a corrected invoice.

Through the Billing Interface, you can import to PeopleSoft Billing any adjustment lines from PeopleSoft Project Costing and PeopleSoft Contracts. Subsequently, you can use the Billing Worksheet to review, approve, defer, or write-off bill lines that you import to PeopleSoft Billing that have not been pre-approved on the PeopleSoft Contracts bill plan.

From the Billing Worksheet, if you approve bill lines, you can select a specific re-bill invoice on which to append the bill lines, or create a new bill for the adjusted bill lines.

Using this correction functionality, you can keep an audit trail of the adjustment activities. The credit bill reverses the charges on the original invoice. You can also create a journal entry in PeopleSoft General Ledger to reverse the erroneous expense, and send the entry to PeopleSoft Project Costing as a bill line. Run the Contracts to Billing Interface process (CA_BI_INTFC) to import the adjustment transaction bill line (as a BIL type row from PeopleSoft Project Costing) through the Billing Interface to PeopleSoft Billing.

After you finalize the credit and re-bill invoices, you can run the Billing to Projects/Contracts Interface process (BIPCC000) to update the Project Resource table (PROJ_RES_TMP_BI) with the new adjustment invoice activity. PeopleSoft Billing creates billing adjustment line types (BAJ) to represent the credit and re-bill invoices.

PeopleSoft Grants supports three basic billing formats and a report format:

Use the Invoice Form field on the Bill Header page in PeopleSoft Billing to indicate the billing format that you want to use. The billing form option enables you to summarize bill lines with varying degrees of detail when you initiate the print process based on the invoice form. The process analyzes the form ID on each bill header and applies the summarization rule to the invoice form. The Bill Generation process assigns a unique invoice ID and a sequence number to each invoice that it produces. Summarization rules are based on account trees.

See PeopleTools: Tree Manager

PeopleSoft Billing uses the bill by ID to define how to group billing activity to create individual bills when data is sent through the billing interface. A bill by ID that you define may appear as the default value at the customer, bill source, bill type, and business unit levels. The PeopleSoft Grants award generation process gets this value from the Sponsor - Bill To Options page.

The following table lists the bill by IDs that are delivered with PeopleSoft Grants.

You may want to create and send invoices for products or services that you will deliver in the future or over a period of time. You can use contract liability accounting to generate accounting entries that defer revenue recognition based on a revenue recognition date and method of your choosing.

You can establish date range contract liability calculation method defaults at the system, business unit, or bill type level, according to your business needs. PeopleSoft Billing supports five calculation methods for creating accounting entries for contract liability of transactions when the recognition basis is on a date range:

• Spread by days within range.

• Spread evenly across all periods.

• Spread evenly using a mid-period rule.

• Spread partial periods by days with remainder spread evenly.

• User-defined proration.

Sometimes, institutions may prepay for goods or services. This creates a prepaid balance that you can use in the future. Because PeopleSoft Grants uses the prepayment functionality in PeopleSoft Contracts, advances appear on PeopleSoft Grants bills with a description of Advance.

PeopleSoft Contracts enables you to:

• Store the details of prepaid balances.

• Bill for direct-purchase prepaid balances.

• Process the utilization of prepaid balances.

• Monitor and control the depletion of prepaid balances over time.

When you establish a prepaid amount, you must assign it to a billing plan. You can either create a new billing plan for the prepaid amount or assign the prepaid amount to an existing billing plan that is associated with fixed-fee contract lines. The billing plan determines the timing and parameters of the initial prepaid billing.

In addition to linking the prepaid amount to a billing plan, you must determine the parameters against which the prepaid balance can be utilized. You can choose to use the prepaid balance against any of these activities:

• All billing activity for all (or some) rate-based contract lines that are contained in the contract.

• All billing activity for one rate-based contract line that is contained in the contract.

• All billing activity for a particular project or activity that is associated with a rate-based contract line that is contained in the contract.

• A portion of the billing activity that is based on resource type or resource category for any of the preceding.

When PeopleSoft Contracts sends rate-based billing activity to PeopleSoft Billing, PeopleSoft Contracts creates additional utilization rows and sends those to PeopleSoft Billing to net out billable amounts. As these rows are sent to PeopleSoft Billing, the prepaid committed amount is increased. After you run the Billing to Projects/Contracts Interface process to finalize billing, the prepaid remaining amount is decremented appropriately. In addition, the system sends the utilization rows back to PeopleSoft Project Costing for analysis and to adjust the balance sheet accounting. The utilization process continues until the prepaid balance equals zero.

Here is a high-level overview of the steps that are involved in setting up and processing advances:

A bill schedule is usually established when reimbursement from the sponsor is based on clinical trials or deliverables instead of specific actual expenses. The sponsor usually outlines the bill schedule in the award document. Instead of using feeder systems to add transactions to the Project Resource table (PROJ_RESOURCE), you use the Add Transactions page in PeopleSoft Project Costing to add scheduled bill lines directly to the Project Resource table.

Here are the steps to creating a bill schedule:

Instructions on using analysis types, creating rate sets and rate plans, adding transactions, and running the pricing engine appear in the PeopleSoft Project Costing documentation. Instructions on associating rate sets and rate plans with contracts and setting billing options appear in the PeopleSoft Contracts documentation.

To further manage and control the timing of billing for transactions that are associated with a contract line, you can define billing events in PeopleSoft Contracts. Billing events are points in time that you define that trigger billing. If you choose to use billing events, you will need to manage the status of those events before you run the billing application engine process. Two event types are available to choose from: Milestone or Date.

• Milestone

  You must first select the origin of the milestone (Contract or Project). The system will look to the application that you specify for the milestone and its status to mark the event as complete.

  If you choose to use this method for a PeopleSoft Grants contract, you must create and manage milestones on the Project Activity - Definition page. If you select the project activity to be a milestone activity, then you need to manage the status of that activity in PeopleSoft Project Costing.

  To ensure that all milestones are set to the correct status before billing occurs, run the Milestone Processing application engine (CA_MS_PRCS) before running the Billing application engine (CA_BI_INTFC) or the Revenue Recognition application engine processes (CA_LOAD_DEF, CA_LOAD_GL1, or PSA_ACCTGGL).

• Date

  Use the Date event type when you want billing for a specific amount to occur on a specific date. In this case you must enter the date that billing should occur and the percent or amount of the total amount for the lines that should be billed.

PeopleSoft Contracts provides Over-the-Limit (OLT) processing to prevent billing for more than the amount of an award (contract). In PeopleSoft Contracts, you can choose to set a maximum amount that may be billed for each contract line that is associated with a contract. This is referred to as a limit.

Here's some general information about how PeopleSoft Contracts handles Over-the-Limit processing:

• The Pricing application engine (PC_PRICING) calls limit processing to check the transactions against this limit.

• Any transactions exceeding the limit are marked OLT and are held back from further processing.

• OLT rows are excluded from billing and revenue processing until you select the Limit Override check box on the Related Projects page in PeopleSoft Contracts.

  If you select the Limit Override check box, the system sends the rows to PeopleSoft Billing and books them to revenue. Future transactions are processed regardless of the previously specified limit.

• If you choose to withhold a portion of the billable amount as a retainage, the retainage may be applied against the over-the-limit item before it is sent to PeopleSoft Billing, depending on the specified installation option.

The LOC billing process calculates LOC draws based on LOC numbers and summarizes the information by document number.

PeopleSoft Billing can defer a charge. Upon approval of an LOC worksheet that contains deferred bill options, the portion of the line amount that is billed retains the BIL (billable amount) analysis type and is billed. The line that is deferred is given the DEF (deferred amount) analysis type and is written back to the Project Resource table. The deferred amount is then brought back into the PeopleSoft Billing system at a later date when you are running processes that populate the billing worksheet.

The PeopleSoft Contracts application engine process (CA_BI_INTFC) selects resource rows (for rate-based methods) from the Project Resource table for PeopleSoft Grants contracts and creates bill lines in the billing interface tables.

After the Billing Interface process stages the billing data in these tables, the billing interface processes the data to create bills.

PeopleSoft Billing ensures that for all awards that use LOC as the means for obtaining payment, the awarded LOC and LOC document number are carried into the bill header.

With LOC processing, you can:

• Establish funding limits.

• Delete worksheet process instances.

• Defer, write off, or bill each line.

• Print pro formas before finalizing data.

Use the Letter of Credit Summary page to review the LOC draw for individual LOC documents. The page displays the limit amount, previous amount, unbilled amount (real and temporary), and allowable draw. The unbillable amount represents the difference between the unbilled amount and the allowable draw amount. The bottom of the page tracks overall dollar amounts for the LOC number. Amounts are updated as you modify information on the billing worksheet. This page is display-only.

Instructions on viewing the LOC summary appear in the PeopleSoft Billing documentation.